The Problems of Syncretism

by Tim Maroney (1997-8)

"Syncretism" is a technical term in religious studies describing
the combination of one mythic figure with another from a different
tradition. Syncretism has been practiced from ancient times to the
modern day. During the Ptolemaic rule over Egypt, many syncretistic
deities were created, such as Hermanubis, a combination of the Greek
Hermes and the Egyptian Anubis. Later, during the Graeco-Roman
mystery period, syncretism became common within the mystery
traditions, the rituals of which often featured prayers which stated
that a particular deity had many other names, and listed those names.
Syncretism is an inevitable consequence of internationalism and it is
not surprising that syncretism has become a common part of the new
occult and pagan religions of today's multicultural world.

Sometimes syncretism seems to go too far. For instance, in
Neo-Pagan Witchcraft and related modern occult traditions, it is said
that "all gods are The God and all goddesses are The Goddess." The
theory of the religion is that a Goddess and a God ruling over the
world in a marital union and producing all phenomena. This has often
been criticized as reducing all the characters of world myth to mere
gender attributes, submerging their individual complexity in an
overarching doctrinal agenda. In another case, the Golden Dawn, an
influential occult group of the late 19th and early 20th centuries,
combined Egyptian deities with Hebrew divine names from the Bible and
other sources. In fact, as most people know, there is no small amount
of historical animosity between the ancient Egyptian and Hebrew
traditions. You wouldn't invite them to the same party, so how can
they both be at the same ritual - more, even conflated, so that an
Egyptian and Hebrew name are seen as synonymous?

The ancient Greek and Roman syncretists were often just as
insensitive and poorly informed, and their practices of assimilation
are largely responsible for the disrepute in which syncretism is held
today in the academic community. The academic response, however, is
starting to become less dogmatic, or at least more readily
challenged, as in Kingsley's recent book on
Empedocles(1), or the concerns
raised by Robert F. Campany in his comparison of the ancient Chinese
sage Xunzi with the pre-modern mythic theorist
Durkheim(2).

The new critique, self-referentially including scholarship itself
among its subjects, notes that it is just as much an error to hold
religious practitioners to the criteria of current scholarship, and
to derogate their efforts for their inevitable failure to satisfy
as-yet-uninvented criteria, as it is to dismiss the efforts of
traditional commentators to understand their own ritual and mythic
practices. Both these naive critiques of traditional religious
philosophy depend on ill-founded assumptions about the unique
superiority of current scholarly methods and viewpoints.

In syncretism as practiced either in ancient or modern times we
find conflations which are meant to be taken as literal statements
about an underlying substrate of symbolic commonality. That is, the
connection between, say, the Egyptian Osiris and the Qabalistic
Tiphareth, is presented as a longstanding fact which has always been
true, even if it was not well known. Many occult syncretisers claim
that a connection such as this was always known by a secret group of
initiates who have only now cleared this mystic truth for public
release(3). Judged as comparative
religion or textual analysis this sort of assertion is defective. It
is therefore tempting to dismiss syncretism as a failed attempt at
amateur scholarship.

If we look at what these commentators are trying to accomplish in
context, however, we wind up at a different model. Although a claim
of traditionalism is made, new myths are being created. Specifically,
the myth of syncretists is that all known myths are only
differentiations of a single unifying primordial myth, sometimes
called the Secret Doctrine. This type of universalist myth can be
found not only in occult and Neo-Platonic sources, but in
Freemasonry, Baha'i, pre-modern comparativism, popular Roman
attitudes towards foreign gods, and so forth. The myth that Osiris is
an expression of Tiphareth deserves the same deference that the
observer gives to any other myth, and its faux historical content is
no more a matter for concern than, say, the fact that Pandora was not
really the first woman. These are the terms on which syncretistic
statements need to be engaged: as expressions of the myth of a common
system behind the appearance of diversity in myth and ritual.

(There is a risk of condescension in this reinterpretation.
Writers like Blavatsky and Crowley really believe that they are
contributing to comparative religion, and letting them off the
critical hook by transposing their writing to a new domain - that of
myth-making - derogates their own account of their intent. However,
the fact is that when judged by the standards of fields like
anthropology, religious studies, or even philosophy, their work fails
to make much of a contribution. We can take them at their face value,
and so be forced to dismiss their work completely because it does not
succeed in the scholarly arena, or we can try to recognize that there
is a difference in intention between their work and scholarly work,
and so recognize its value with respect to its actual context. The
latter approach is less hostile and dismissive, although either
interpretation would be rejected by the writers themselves due to
their insistence that they are making a scholarly contribution.)

The act of correlation is creative because it is largely
arbitrary. Major figures such as Apollo have so many attributes that
they could be correlated at some small remove to almost anything. The
selection of some particular attribute (such as music, inducement of
visionary experience, solar illumination, the progression of the
seasons, stateliness, archery, or what have you) as the primary
attribute by which Apollo is connected to the universalist table of
correpondences is an arbitrary choice by the syncretistic
practitioner. Apollo is not Ra and the claim that he is Ra creates a
new myth. Through a set of arbitrary choices of this kind, each of
which reduces a complex symbol to a simple cipher, a new universalist
myth consisting of a set of relationships is created.

While a table of correspondence a la Agrippa, Barrett or Crowley
is useless for the scholar, for the ritualist it serves as a new kind
of myth from which ritual practices may be generated by juxtaposing
the contents of the columns. It masquerades as the key of all
religions, but it is not that - it is an original and creative
divination table, based on a set of freshly-minted mythic "facts"
about the relations between traditional symbols. It is above all a
practical tool, and judging it by the same standards as a
dissertation in religious studies would miss the point, even though
its creators might want it to be judged that way.

An objection to syncretism that has often been raised is that it
leads to awkward and inelegant combinations of elements that are
actually irreconcilable. Again the strongest example is the
combination of divine names from the devoutly anti-Egyptian Hebrew
tradition with the names and images of Egyptian deities from the
19th-century Egyptology craze. While this criticism may be valid on a
literary level - a great deal of freshly-rolled myth is poorly
crafted - it is inevitable that in a system based on a myth of
universalism, disparate symbols will be deliberately juxtaposed. This
illustrates the basic premise of the myth, that all the appearances
of diversity in religious symbolism are only illusionary, and that on
an inner level accessible to the initiated, the symbols are all
instantiations of an abstract unifying monomyth.

These juxtapositions of opposed symbols are not ignorant or
careless. They represent a deliberate flouting of taboos. The
symbolic universalist knows full well that it is offensive to an
ordinary Christian to say that an aspect of Jehovah is virtually
synonymous with a Greek god, an astrological sign, and an Arabic
demon, and so he or she chooses to be offensive, to express a protest
against these differentiations. A system that did not contain these
"erroneous" juxtapositions would be a system that did not express the
universalist myth. Similarly, the popular Roman belief that foreign
deities were only degraded forms of their own specifically expressed
a myth of the propriety of Roman world domination.

Obviously, a mythic system based on protest creates conflicts with
those who are dedicated to the targets of the protest. A devout Jew,
steeped in an idea of sacralization which is rooted in the overthrow
of Egyptian polytheism by Hebrew monotheism, must find it grotesque
and absurd to combine the two traditions. From this conservative
Jewish perspective, universalism is erroroneous in its leveling,
while to the universalist, traditional Judaism is erroneous in its
parochialism. It is not the work of the scholar to resolve such
disputes, because they are not disputes on a scholarly plane - they
derive from the social and emotional factors by which people accept
certain myths and reject others. The scholar is treading on very
dangerous ground in making normative statements about mythic
acceptance and rejection and must ordinarily be content with simple
observation(4). At the same time,
it is possible to contribute descriptively in explaining in what ways
the criticisms that each side aims at the other fail to accurately
engage the other's intent and assumptions. In the end syncretism is a
religious practice, which the scholar must study with the same
deference or lack thereof that would be afforded any other practice.